She managed our affiliate program, worked on pretty much every aspect of Shoeboxed, and survived working with the guys. We’ll miss you!
Julia’s off to finish her International Business degree at Rollins College. Come back soon!
I’m going to need some cake and candles immediately. Also, a party hat would be great. Why? Not that I need a reason, but Shoeboxed is celebrating its first birthday today!
We’ve been working on this idea since 2006, but we finally launched our original open beta version of Shoeboxed one year ago today.
Thanks to everyone who has supported us over the last year: our users, investors, friends, family, and late-night security guards! We couldn’t have done it without you!
To celebrate, we starting a free trial of Shoeboxed today. Sign up now and you’ll get 30 days free to try out Shoeboxed Receipt Mail-In!
We should have birthdays more often.
You’ve either never heard of it, or you’re totally addicted. If you’re not Tweeting, you’re not on the Web. Sorry, that’s just how it works.
Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows you to post updates about what you are up to. Updates are limited to 140 characters, so you end up with a feed of short blurbs from people that you choose to “follow.”
Shoeboxed has been active on Twitter as of late; we’re obsessed. If you’re already in the Twittersphere, follow us!
Shoeboxed is at twitter.com/shoeboxed
I’m at twitter.com/danenglander
Taylor is at twitter.com/taylormingos
Julia is at twitter.com/jcsullivan
We post updates there quite often. We announce special offers through Twitter sometimes too. Send us a message about whatever you want. I answered a customer support question today on Twitter.
If you tweet “I love @Shoeboxed” and direct message us your mailing address and shirt size, we’ll send you a free shirt!
Tweet!
Shoeboxed has returned to its roots, at least for a couple of days.
Taylor and Tobi had some meetings in Frankfurt this week, and were able to snap some shots of their trip. I’m their lackey today back in Durham, just forwarding along their adventures. When you’re in Frankfurt, you don’t have time to blog.
Typical random Internet cafe
Taylor in Frankfurt
Autobahn!
If you haven’t been following our history for very long, you might not know that although Shoeboxed was founded here in North Carolina, we developed the final versions our software and business model while living in Berlin during the summer of 2007. We’ve got a bunch of German-speakers on the team (not to mention a German), so we don’t really mind hopping over the Pond to spend a few days in the Vaterland.
We have received generous seed capital from well known German entrepreneurs and have many friends and advisors from the burgeoning German start-up scene.
Though we have strong ties to Germany, we’re still scanning your receipts from North Carolina in the old US of A and still base our entire operation out of our Durham office, near Duke University.
Some of us headed up to New York last weekend to show the big city what we’re made of. We pulled onto the Island around 4 am Friday morning sporting our new SUPER RECEIPT SAVER shirts.
Our debut on Wall Street five hours later drew a large crowd. And we met many interesting people. We even found a business analyst who claimed to have every single receipt he’d acquired over the past thirty years - mind you he looked like he couldn’t be older than 32.
When a street preformer got a little crazy and the police began dispersing the crowd, we decided to visit other parts of the Island.
Everywhere we went people stopped us to find out what we were all about. We spread the Shoeboxed love all over the lower east side. For a while, we even staked a claim over NYC’s own Shoebox at Astor Place.
It was a great time. But after three days the lack of sleep had started to get to us! We were happy to head home. If you got a chance to see us, be sure to leave us a comment!
So, can you guess which ride was ours?
What’s different about this airport?
Oh right, Shoeboxed team members have arrived. You really can’t miss us when we’re out and about, and I just wanted to keep everybody updated on what we’re doing. If you’re in an airport and you see us, remind us of this blog entry, and we’ll sign you up for our receipt scanning service, Receipt Mail-In, totally free.
Keep an eye out. We may or may not be in Laguardia today.
As you may have noticed, we’re doing a little work on our servers this evening. We’re putting the finishing touches on a fix that will improve our server performance and get another server up and running. Friday nights in the Shoeboxed office: a great place to be.
Sorry to have to take the site down for a couple of hours, but these improvements will hopefully be visible to you, the user. We’re never going to stop trying to give you a better Shoeboxed. If you have any questions during this time, feel free to give us a call at (888) 369-4269 or email us at help@team.shoeboxed.com.
While we’re waiting, let’s do a caption contest in the comments section! Seriously I don’t even know where to begin, but I’ll take a crack at it too.
Have a great weekend!
You might want to sit down for this. We’re about to announce our best prize EVER.
An IPHONE is on the line today, people. Get ready. We’ve got an iPhone sitting in our office, and we’re just waiting to give it out.
So who will be the lucky winner? Well, here’s how it’s going to work.
If you can talk with 5 people and have them sign up for Receipt Mail-In (any level plan), you’ll be eligible to win!
By participating, you’ll have a great chance of winning this unbelievable piece of technology.
So talk to everyone you know, get your boss or your employees to sign up, give your kids Mail-In for their birthdays, heck, buy it for yourself! Anything you can do to sign people up gets you that much closer to owning the coolest phone in the world!
Once you think you’ve gotten 5 people to sign up, email us their names, and we’ll double check to make sure they’ve signed up. Once you have 5, you’re automatically entered.
I’m so excited! Somebody’s getting an IPHONE!!!
A lawyer at one of the larger firms around here sent us a pretty funny email the other day that was definitely worth sharing. It’s about his experience at our local airport, RDU.
I just hit the men’s room at RDU before hopping on my flight tonight. Each urinal had a shoeboxed.com business card on top of it.
Don’t really have anything else to add, except that the guy at the urinal next to me took the card off his urinal. I didn’t stick around to see if you guys have someone nearby that runs in an replaces the cards. : )
Hope all’s well.
First of all, this is absolutely hysterical and a testament to our off-the-wall marketing team. Secondly, we may or may not have been passing out flyers at the airport. It is possible that there are some Shoeboxed fans roaming the terminal bathrooms at RDU leaving flyers in unsuspecting places. Who knows where they came from :).
With regard to the runners who come in and replace the cards: that’s one of the funniest mental images I’ve had in a while, so props to our lawyer friend who literally made me laugh out loud.
I wonder if the guy who picked the card up at the urinal ended up signing up. If you’re the guy and you can somehow prove it, we want to hear from you!
It’s tough being the Shoeboxed chauffeurs. Executive orders this morning left some important details out, nonetheless we pulled out the sign: “Shoeboxed.com for Bill Gates” and got to work. We patiently waited by the baggage claim.
For some reason, people were shocked that Bill was coming. People quickly found their movie cameras and filmed away. Others pointed, laughed, and some even pretended not to care, although their eyes were glued to the sign. Head of RDU security stopped us. “You should go check the millionaire’s baggage claim back there!”
Despite the attention we drew, we couldn’t find him in Terminal A or the Millionaire’s baggage cliam. We even checked the restrooms, phone booths, and by the soda machines. So we headed to Terminal C.
In Terminal C, we set up shop at the foot of the escalators by the baggage claim. As people rode down the escalator, jaws dropped, minds were boggled, conversations were dropped. Still, no Bill.
Maybe he’ll make it tomorrow.
Even though we didn’t find him, we definitely got some interesting looks, and people made some pretty memorable comments.
The funniest statements:
“Oh my lord… Bill Gates is coming to town? I’ve been filming a YouTube documentary on my trip. Mind if I include this? Also, remind him to support the baby boomer generation of women, when he comes.”
“Daddy, what’s Shoeboxed.com?”
“You must’ve missed the executive airport!”
“No, Bill is a man of the people”-Etienne
“Which flight was he on? I didn’t see him” - Random Traveler
“Really? He was wearing a Shoeboxed.com T-Shirt!” - Etienne
The looks we got were priceless.
Taylor and Rolf spent a good deal of time over at the CED Venture Conference that was hosted at Duke’s on-campus hotel, The Washington Duke. They met lots of great people this weekend.
We hung out with the team from Grooveshark, a legal music sharing website that looks to have gotten their hands on a great idea. They even made it over to the Shoeboxed office.
Also, Digital Smiths, another local company, does some pretty cool video ad matching.
And as always, Square 1, Shoeboxed’s bank was there.
I know Shoeboxed had a great time there, and we hope to see everybody there next year!
Shoeboxed is excited to announce its official Earth Day initiative. As you all know, we strive to be a green company, and have made tremendous efforts in the past few weeks in and out of the office to build on our already strong commitment to earth-friendliness.
Our latest development is a receipt recycling drive starting on Earth Day, this upcoming Tuesday April 22nd. Shoeboxed invites all businesses and individuals to submit paper receipts to us through April 29th. All the receipts we receive will eventually be transported by foot, bike, scooter, or Toyota Prius to the local recycling plant.
If you help us achieve our goal to recycle a tree’s worth of receipts (58 kilograms), we’ll even scan all receipts and load them into your free Shoeboxed account for you before recycling them. That’s a pretty sweet deal, as this service usually costs $19.95 per month.
When you are sending in your receipts, make sure to include your name, email address, and phone number in an envelope with your receipts.
For more information about the impact that paper receipts have on our environment and some more details about Shoeboxed’s Earth Day celebrations, check out our Shoeboxed Earth Day page.
Digitize receipts. Save the Earth. Shoebox everyday.
The much-anticipated changes to the blog are finished! We’re definitely excited about the changes, and you hope that you get a chance to play around on the blog and see them yourself.
We upgraded to the latest version of WordPress to improve many of our blog features, including the way you browse archived blogs. Be sure to check out the brand new tag cloud on the right side. You can easily see which topics are popular based on the size of the tag (bigger words are more popular; smaller words are up and coming topics). We’ve also updated out social bookmarking widgets.
With the new changes to the blog, we wan to hear your feedback! Turn your favorite entries into discussions. Let us know how you feel about what we’ve been working on and share your own stories with us through the comments section!
Just to let everybody know, we are doing some maintenance on the blog to give you a better Shoeblog experience. We’ll be updating to the latest version of WordPress, and this may cause the blog to look a little funky today. Bear with us; it should be back up and running later today! In the meantime, you can get your fix of the Shoeboxed team by checking out our Flickr account.
One great thing about being next to Duke University is that we get to sit in on a lot of national and international conferences about topics relevant to Shoeboxed. Today, I am sitting in on a conference about intellectual property and ecommerce, two things we are obviously interested in over here.
The people involved in the conference are:
Iain M. Cockburn, Professor of Finance and Economics and Everett W. Lord Distinguished Faculty Scholar in the School of Management at Boston University.
Wesley Cohen, Faculty Director, Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business.
Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, the former Vice President of Technical Strategy and Innovation at IBM.
Lew Zaretzki, Vice President of Consulting Services at ThinkFire
Tony Tramontin, an Associate Principal in McKinsey & Company’s New York office.
James E. Malackowski, the President and Chief Executive Officer of Ocean Tomo, LLC, an integrated Intellectual Capital Merchant Banc firm.
They are talking pretty theoretically right now about what defines and determines markets. Will there be a more efficient and and pure market for intellectual property somewhere in the future? Right now, we are seeing a lot of “patent trolls” for example, that buy up a lot of IP, but do not use them right away, causing the market to be less efficient. Is this bad? Should it change? Will it?
More to come in the comments section…
